The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Hell no. But I still wish you’d forget it.

  A voice he’d come to think of as mad or near mad bespeaking him out of darkness from the pallet where he’d thought Roosterfish slept. A wineblurred reenactment of old wrongs and injustices he’d thought he was done with. A new note creeping slyly in tonight.

  You ever get any off that old woman? Roosterfish’s voice from the floor, from the dark by the radiator. He’d been silent so long Edgewater had thought him asleep.

  What old woman?

  Mrs. Bradshaw. Ye mama in law.

  God no. Why would you say anything like that?

  She used to cut a pretty wide swath in her younger days. I guess she’s changed some now though. It’s been near eighteen year since I had anything to do with her.

  Edgewater had arisen on his bed but he could not see Roosterfish. He leaned back on his elbows. Dim light from the streetlamps fell on the north wall but black shadows from the windowsill bisected it and Roosterfish’s voice came out of the darkness.

  I don’t believe any of that bullshit, Edgewater said. That old woman’s washed in the blood.

  You ever see anybody washed cleaner than the ones needed it the most? They ain’t nobody harder on whiskey than a reformed drunk. That woman used to really like it. But she was a Jesus shouter even back then at the same time. Used to nearly drive her crazy, she couldn’t decide whether she was saved for the streets of gold or doomed to the fire pits. Lord, them was some times. Used to be them traveling tent revivals come through and they’d hold em out in the woods wherever some farmer’d give em leave to camp. Brush arbors. That preacher’d get wound tightern a mainspring about ten o’clock hollerin and speakin in tongues and all you’d have to do is just take her arm and kindly guide her to the bushes but she was of two minds about it. She’d act like she didn’t want it. Screw ye and grit her teeth all at the same time. Her folks plumb give up on her. Time she married Bradshaw both them kids was a walkin. Little woods colts.

  Roosterfish?

  Yeah?

  Roosterfish, I don’t need a history lesson. All that stuff is dead and gone to me.

  Well. That may be. I’se more thinkin aloud than talkin. But it’s somethin to me. You told me you saw the inevitability of things but I doubt you do. It’s all preordained to you. I doubt you see how a man’ll set his path to deliberately ruin another man. Take coverin up the trail a man left through sand. Kick through all the tracks and rake sand in em and scatter a few leaves around over em, it’s just like nobody walked through there at all. Ever place a man’s been or everything he touched stomped down like he never was.

  Roosterfish, Edgewater said after a time. Is there not any way I can make you forget all this crazy old shit?

  A man’s accountable, Roosterfish said, and then he was silent. After a while Edgewater thought him asleep but then he heard the unscrewing of the cap from the wine bottle, the soft sound of drinking. The cap going back on.

  That winter Bradshaw was much on the road, the old Chevrolet a familiar sight at Goblin’s Knob, Sycamore Center, Crying Woman Hollow. All the habitats of bootleggers and whores and gamblers, those who followed these crafts for a profession and those trying to lose their amateur standing. Anyone who would indulge him, include him, not make him the fool when like accrued to like. Was one fool more or less than the other?

  Sudy was back home and the old woman accepted her return with a grim silence, a silence that Bradshaw felt he could not endure. The house seemed to turn hateful, cursed with a stillness that seemed to impart old regrets and dissatisfactions and forlornly keep them eternally fresh, surreal emotions that transcended human tenacity, would leave the very atmosphere charged and telluric long after they were gone. Silence was the mortar the brick was laid with, silence chinked the cracks to thwart the winter wind.

  His face in a watermarked mirror, cutting the part in his hair keen as a knife edge with his comb. A smell of aftershave, faint effluvia of beer. The door filled, blocked the light. Even to his eyes a harridan draped in black, already tendrils crept from the grave to ensnare and draw her down.

  Where you goin?

  I got a date, he said.

  Where at?

  The part suited him. He turned his head slightly, the light fell in a soft sheen across the Brilliantined waves on his head. Where the lights is bright and the music is loud, he told her. He was looking for passage out and she was standing in the door.

  When you comin in? What time’ll you be back?

  When you see me comin. He stepped past her and she turned in silence to watch him go. The door to Sudy’s bedroom was closed.

  Palpable reprieve when he stepped onto the porch and pulled the door to behind him. He was in another world, a world with sharper colors, brighter sounds. Beyond the door silence whispered to silence, a relieved conspiracy of ennui and atrophy said, At last, he’s gone, he’s gone. The house seemed to settle itself, to sigh.

  And gone.

  Gone in a brief burst of smoking rubber to McAnally’s, drinking halfwarm homebrew and listening to old men’s tales of winters past. The creak of chairs the soft slap of wellworn cards. McAnally’s sloe-eyed daughter standing hipslung in the door framed by a coal oil lamp and eyeing him with a kind of tremulous arrogance, the planes and angles of her face all light and shadow from the lamp. Her eyes alone clearly visible, dark holes drawing off all the light. Hungry, wise. Her legs and hips outlined through the thin cotton shift, black like some pornographic negative held to the light. The bitter hot taste of the homebrew going down. The road again, the sound of slewing gravel, the weight of a thigh against his, a breast beneath his hand. What was real and what was fantasy that winter swirled and ran like watered ink. He adapted for himself a kind of homemade reality.

  A girl from Beaver Dam so utterly unwashed that he could not believe it. No stickler for hygiene, even Bradshaw must have the windows down. The wind off ice, a rattling of frozen trees.

  What’s the matter? You raised in a barn?

  The strong odor of fish, raw, tainted. I just need me a little fresh air.

  Apparently she could not smell it or perhaps she enjoyed it. You freezin me to death.

  Looking down past her mounded breasts and belly, the kinked pubic hair, he watched his penis disappearing into her, imagined it set upon and devoured by vast hordes of microscopic piranha that swam in the seas of her body. When he was finished he got out of the car surreptitiously and washed himself off with whiskey, the pain a kind of catharsis. He felt himself cauterized, did a little soundless dance, limp penis shrinking and strumming in the December wind.

  In a burst of entrepreneurism he saw himself rising Horatio Algerishly in the world of bootlegging. Finding Boogerman drunk and sleeping it off, he stole twelve gallon jugs of whiskey from him and sold them to Cates Burcham. Under cover of darkness he stole them back from Cates and sold them to Big Mama. He figured all he needed to become a millionaire was perpetual night and several hundred more bootleggers, an infinite number.

  You would see him on the streetcorners, a White Owl Tiparillo firmly clamped in his lean jaw, yellow feral eyes, slits that narrowed to appraise the eternally passing possibilities. Holding forth in the poolroom, younger boys drawn to him by his stories of things he had not done in places he had never been, improbable women who had said to him unlikely things. He with his tales like some old lecher with suspect candy.

  Yet driving through winter dusks it came to him that some great exodus was leaving the land, he drove past old deserted houses with blind windows and canted hardware, robbed doors and past untended fields grown with dog fennel and beggarlice and scrub brush. The world was in suspension, gone south for the winter. With winter, malaise lay on him like a stone. He longed for warmer climes, better times. Even the weather seemed to conspire against him. The sky was slate gray. It began to rain a steady ceaseless drizzle and the temperature fell, beaded drops of water hung hesitant on winter trees and froze on looping telephone wires, there was a cold in him w
hiskey would not warm, no fire would dissipate.

  He went to look up Edgewater. He climbed the stairs and knocked at the door. Hey, Billy, he called, but there was only silence. No light beneath the door. Perhaps Edgewater had already gone. He tried the knob but the door was locked.

  Back outside he drove aimlessly through near empty streets. In the rain garish plastic Christmas candles and roped tinsel looped pole to pole looked tawdry, sodden, the wind funneled scraps of paper up the alleys like dirty snow. Spurious Santas from shop windows brought back knifelike and bitter the snows of his childhood.

  Arnold was at the Southside Café drinking coffee when Bradshaw found him. He wore an enormous greatcoat that near swallowed him and whatever myriad moths it housed. He looked peaked and depressed, wizened and morose victim of whatever plague had befallen Bradshaw.

  I been ridin around this son of a bitch, Bradshaw said. All it needs is somebody to kick the dirt in. If there’s a sign of life around here I missed it. He fumbled a nickel from his pocket. Gimme a coffee, Sue. Arnold, you seen Billy?

  Not in several days. I seen him with Roosterfish. They looked like they was cookin somethin up. Then last Wednesday I went up there to see did he want to go drink a beer but he didn’t. He was readin a book.

  What?

  I ast him did he want to go drink a beer and he said naw. He was eating chocolate candy out of a box and he was reading some big old thick book.

  I’ll be damned.

  He’s a funny feller.

  Yeah he is. He’s all right though.

  You not still mad about Sudy?

  I can’t live nobody’s life but mine.

  He cupped the coffee mug in his palms, felt the rising steam warm on his face. He looked about him, saw nothing that promised to relieve the boredom the night threatened.

  Let’s ride around awhile. He arose, left the coffee unfinished.

  All right. Arnold drained his cup.

  Keep it between the ditches, Sue said.

  Live hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory, Bradshaw said.

  Who for? she wanted to know.

  They circled the Daridip. It was deserted save a forlorn waitress who watched them without interest through waterbeaded glass.

  Ride out to Cates’s and get a halfpint.

  I’ll pay if you’ll go in and get it. I’ll go on down the road and let you out and you go in like you’ve come on foot.

  Why?

  He’s pissed at me, Bradshaw said.

  How come?

  I don’t know. He just don’t like me.

  They say somebody stole a bunch of whiskey off of him.

  I wouldn’t doubt it. People ain’t got no morals anymore, Bradshaw said. He pulled out into the street, turned at the corner. He started to accelerate, then he slowed and pulled to the side of the road. Florida, by God, he said.

  What’s the matter? Arnold asked.

  Let’s go to Florida.

  What?

  Hell yes. I’ve got the money to get us there. They’s work down there. Hell, we’ll lay up and take the sun and anytime we get hungry we’ll just reach up and pick an orange.

  Goddamn. You reckon we could sure enough?

  You fuckin A we can go.

  What’d we do in a big place like that?

  Hell, give a pair of highrollers like us a week and we’ll own the place.

  I’d sure like to go. Damn, just head out.

  Bradshaw released the clutch, pulled back out onto the pavement. We’re as good as gone. I’ll run you by your place and you put your shit in a pasteboard box and get ready. I got to see somebody a minute.

  Don’t change your mind. How long’s it take to get to Florida?

  I don’t know. But we’ll find out. I’ll pick you up in a little while.

  ———

  He fortified himself with a pint of peach brandy at Big Mama’s and was underway again. With the decision to leave, a heady euphoria had lifted his depression. He did not even mind the rain he drove through. He felt that all that was wrong or complicated or too much trouble to worry about was being lifted from him, placed on more responsible shoulders than his own. He was being given another chance, the slate was being wiped clean, he could begin somewhere anew. Who knew what Florida held for one as ambitious as himself.

  A vague and foetal plan had crept into his mind, formed itself without his conscious effort, as if it were some misbegotten and deformed offering of his subconscious. He slowed, stopped where a farm road turned off the blacktop where charred cinderblocks and rusted shapeless metal marked an old houseplace, parked under bare branches of an ancient shade tree.

  The rain was soft on the rooftop, mesmeric. He drank from the brandy, fancied he felt the progress of its slow warmth through miles of veins, capillaries, until it seeped through his entire body. He could feel a warm and comfortable layer of it beneath his skin. He thought of walking into the Knob, not as some experience he dreaded but a curious kind of anticipation, and he forced himself to sit for some time, drawing out the implications, its possibilities. When at length he had finished the brandy he got out and threw away the bottle. There was an old ungathered cornfield he knew about below the house site near shapeless in the dark and there, like some supermarket shopper gauging size and quality, he moved from stalk to stalk feeling among the ears of corn that had survived foraging crows and tenant farmers with tow sacks.

  He was searching for just one particular ear that he felt he would recognize when he found it. He searched almost the entire field before he pulled one and raised it, judged its size against the pale and dripping heavens. It looked to be sixteen or so inches long and as thick around as his forearm. It suited him. He walked back to the car swinging it along in his hand and with the light of his cigarette lighter began to fumble through the contents of the glove compartment until he came upon a half roll of black electrician’s tape.

  Trousers pooled about his ankles he stood taping the ear of corn to his upper thigh, spindly legs glowing ghostly in the murky dark. A spectacle worth comment should the headlights of a passing car seek him out where he stood like some erotic revenant engaged in a tableau of the obscure and sadistic. Already tight, the trousers barely fit when he pulled them up and adjusted them to his satisfaction. He stood unsteady for a moment feeling with his hands this addition to his wardrobe. He wished for a mirror. At last he walked stifflegged to the car and got in.

  What few drinkers were out this rainy night gave Bradshaw scant attention when he seated himself at a corner table and awaited service. He lit a cigar, appraised the room with his reptilian eyes, catching her eye and nodding when she raised a mug.

  She set the beer down and scooped up his change and turned to leave but he would not have it so. Tonight there was something subtly different about him. An air of confidence tonight, the easy calm assurance of a man who has dwelt on the riddles of the cosmos and found them not so insoluble. I’m leavin for Florida tonight, he told her, leaning back a little in the chair. I just thought I’d drop by and say goodbye.

  Goodbye, she said, but she did not move. She waited to see if there was more.

  There was. I just wanted to see you again, he told her. I may not be in this place again and I just wanted to see your face, to kind of place it in my mind like a picture.

  She did not reply. He waited for a moment as if to give her opportunity for speech and when she did not take it he said, You got a date tonight?

  I don’t know yet. I got to get back to the bar.

  She was barely back behind it when Bradshaw drained off the beer and began making urgent beckoning signals at her. She did not turn toward him for some time. When she finally did he raised the empty mug aloft and made beckoning gestures with it.

  When she brought the fresh mug he had his chair cocked against the wall and his coat off and draped across his lap and he was inclined toward further conversation. Sit down awhile, he told her.

  I can’t sit down. I got to tend bar. Swalls don’t pay
me for shootin the breeze with the customers.

  I never seen nobody like you, he said as if he had not heard her. I can just look at you and it just runs all over me. I just wish you’d look at the way you got me tore up. He moved the coat, drew her eyes with his hand to his crotch.

  Her eyes widened, a face with a stunned look of incredulity, near slack with surprise and disbelief. Then she looked quickly away, turned on her heel and went back to the bar. Perhaps he’d misjudged her, he thought. Perhaps he’d offended some delicate propriety not heretofore in evidence. But in a minute or two he looked up and she was watching him across the room with a curious calculating look on her face, as if she were mentally reevaluating him. He ignored her and sipped his beer, studied the patterns of his socks, stared through the hazy smoke at the other drinkers.

  On her rounds about the room she would glance at him covertly and he began to make gestures at her. He would pull at his trousers, try to draw slack between the tight material and his great pinchbeck erection. Scoot around the chair in some grotesquely exaggerated vain search for comfort. She’d look away. People began to glance curiously at Bradshaw. After a time she brought a fresh mug over, although he had not called for it, and when she set it down she just stood there. After a moment he looked at her and suddenly he felt he was seeing her for the first time since they had been in the seventh grade: he was aware of changes he had not noticed, the face of a budding girl vanished and here were minute crowsfeet at the corners of her eyes, a sooty telltale dark at the roots of her platinum hair. But her body was still ripe and her breasts still thrust against the cloth of her blouse.

  What time you getting off?

  Eleven o’clock. I reckon you can take me home if you still want to.

  He took her not home but down the intricate scenery of dogwoods on Firetower Ridge, as if he were unused to the comforts of home and bed and unable to function save in some extension so symbolic of the highway.

  Halfdemented he was tearing at her clothes. An act perpetuated so endlessly in myth that it took on texture of the surreal. Each moment seemed frozen in icy clarity. A breast sprang free, his fingers were hooked in the elastic of her drawers. Surely pubic hair such as this must have been spun in the night by Rumpelstiltskin. Some curious aberrance of time. Here were a lifetime of memories being accumulated helter skelter in the space of moments.